A CONDOR FEATHER STARTED IT

Early on in my adventure into blogging, I wrote something about the condors that were once on the prairie and in the Midwest.  I had swallowed whole the book called "Freckles" by Gene Stratton-Porter, a red-headed female ornithologist and photographer of the Limberlost, a swampy forest of hardwoods in Indiana.  Many girls know “A Girl of the Limberlost” which is about a girl with a poverty-hardened mother whose helper is a thinly disguised version of Stratton-Porter.  Fewer know “Freckles” which became a movie starring Audie Murphy.  After seeing it, I sent him a fan letter and received a nice note and photo in return.  But the star of “Freckles” was really a condor, who dropped a feather on the boy. 

There are articles about the Plains Indians’ relationship to condors, which included a dance imitating them.  But I had to go looking for those articles.  “Freckles” was one of my grandmother’s books.  When I was growing up, the bookshelves were salted with books from earlier generations, including my father’s books about explorers and natural history writers.  In addition, I was devoted to Isak Dinesen’s books.  

So when my post about condors attracted the interest of writers on Stephen Bodio’s Querencia  (stephenbodio.blogspot.com), that contact has meant I’ve kept up with his blog ever since.  Several fascinating people post there, including Cat Urbigkit, a sheep rancher and a natural history writer/photographer who knows antelope and wolves, and raises big guard dogs.  A good sample at http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2016/08/its-fairly-predictable-that-within.html

Traditional hunting trio

Steve himself was passingly a Montana writer in the Bozeman cadre before going on south to Magdalena, NM.  He’s a connected guy through Saluki dogs, eagles and hawks, fine guns, Eurasia and a first marriage to Betsy Huntington (who died of cancer) and a second marriage to Libby, a strong partner.  He is female-friendly without being icky, but he’s also an exemplar of manliness, which he has centered in Eurasia, one of the most horseback macho warrior territories on the planet.  Born in Boston, he came to natural history through the great museums that resulted from the exploits of men now often demonized -- both those who went out across the country like Teddy Roosevelt and those who financed expeditions sometimes preposterous and often deadly.

http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2016/07/visiting-american-museum.html

Peter Matthiessen

Bodio says:

I ate it all, indiscriminately, as I did that of a generation nearer my own; Peter Mattthiessen, and the playboy turned edgy artist and conservationist Peter Beard were obviously cut from the same cloth. It says something about my naivete that I never even thought of the fact that, as Betsy Huntington put it with mild exasperation, "All those people were richer than GOD".  I thought everybody had adventures and wrote about them, so I found ways, and did. Later I was inducted as a fellow into the Explorers Club, a sort of unofficial annex across the street. Bakewell was recruited as a member of the crew of the first circumpolar flight in the bar of the EC! Before the war, adventurers seemed to belong to the Social Register, the AMNH, and the Club. Kirk recently sent me some xeroxed pages about Carter Burden's Komodo Dragon expedition in the 20's (I have the book- isn't he the grandfather of the editor of Vanity Fair?), from a book called "All About Scientific Expeditions", and seeing that it also had Beebe  et al, I asked if it should better be called "All About Scientific Expeditions by New York socialites”?. . .

It was really a meritocracy, though, and you didn't have to be rich, a New Yorker, or even an American to belong.

But it sure did help to have money.  Might not save your life — it didn’t keep Rockefeller from being cannibalized.  The transcendent end of the scale was Richard Halliburton swimming nude in the reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal by moonlight.  By today, people have walked across Africa with a GPS in their pocket and David Quammen, a Bozeman guy, is part of the new natural history urgent exploration pursuing the deadly passengers on mosquitoes that “Spillover” on us, as deadly as tigers. Like HIV.

So here’s the swerve.  Having followed all the Brit 19th century explorations of Empire, I didn’t exactly walk in their footsteps but instead, parallel, came to Blackfeet country, where the earliest aristocratic and filthy-rich Europeans came up the Mississippi/Missouri to the high prairie.  At the time I didn’t know that history.  It gradually emerged and almost continued as a virtual pattern.  The Sixties with Bob Scriver was focussed on the life a hundred years earlier, which meant that every day was a century milestone of adventure.  Natural history museums were also a strong shared tie, both the big institutional ones and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now dispersed.

This background prepared me for a decade-long writing friendship with Tim Barrus, at the end of years of intercontinental airplane travel by the gay community.  I heard about the inclusive relationships with all races and economic levels from bare survival to elegant hotels.  Atypical sexual orientations, rapidly surfacing to identified viability, turned out to be a kind of passport, an access to many other people outside the white male corporate hegemony.  Incredibly, sexwork gave trapdoor access to its underbelly.  (Women have always known that.)

What’s remarkable about T. is that he kept his attention always on neglected, abused, and traumatized children, mostly boys.  Because boys soon become men, this has resulted in a webwork of relationships and strategies, sometimes political but mainly focused on survival.  They are not made “normal,” but are inspired to help each other on their own terms, more humanities than science.  Now it’s not the airplane but the internet that is a way to explore.  

When I thought about boys huddled in cardboard boxes behind dumpsters in alleys, I thought about tough guys like Mattheissen surviving through the Tibetan mountain nights with strange foods and lurking pye dogs, in partnership with George Schaller, that redoubtable field biologist.  I thought that boys on the edge of civilization were as interesting as snow leopards, which are also maimed — at least the ones in zoos because they are caught by the foot.  Snow leopards cannot be taught to tell their stories, but boys can — even the ones who have been sexually abused, beaten up, dependent on drugs.  

Boys cannot and should not be kept behind bars, which is the solution our culture has for both leopards and troublesome kids.  It’s only another level of abuse.  I spent five years thinking about street animals when I worked animal control, but now I’ve spent ten years thinking about street boys.  When I saw some of their crazier vids, I thought of Peter Beard’s famous photo of himself jammed into a dead crocodile.

Peter Beard in a Crocodile

Only now am I becoming hopeful because of the new understanding that all life is connected, in process, interpenetrating, interdependent, and both constituting and exploiting the environment.  I live on the high prairie against the Rockies and never forget it, never let poetry lift my feet out of the grass, but now I want to know about my thinking instrument: my body as a recording organism up against the environment.  I watch the sky for falling condor feathers.  Or falling stars.

All that political thrashing we’re enduring is the death of another Empire, rather more various than the British one now jammed into the jaws of Brexit.  It’s a paper empire that lives on fungible exchanges through the Internet. I think it is doomed, but I don’t know what comes afterwards.  I’m interested in survival and therefore I turn to the “Smash Street Boys,” “Show Me Your Life,” and “Real Stories Gallery.”  I want to know how they make it through the night.

"THE GOSHAWK" by T.H. WHITE

Bob Scriver, human nest for an "eyas" (young hawk).

The bird was not an eagle, but died before we knew what kind of hawk.

When I first began this pursuit of airborne internet communication, watching the high fliers and learning the skies, I told about our pet eagle who came to us crammed into a cardboard box and ruled the backyard with screams for many years, though she never flew.  Often she sat staring into what looked to us an empty sky.  With binoculars, we could barely see some high flier. 
  

Stephen Bodio

Telling the story brought me the attention of a network of falconers, mostly connected to Stephen Bodio’s blog called “Querencia,” which is the place in a bullring where a bull desires to be.  http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com  

It’s also the name of Bodio’s elegiac love story about his remarkable first wife, published by Russell Chatham with one of his mysterious yearning tonalist paintings for a cover.   Bodio’s second wife, Libby, is equally remarkable.   Most of Bodio’s books are about raptors, pigeons, and gazehounds like salukis.  The “blogroll” on his own blog of other bloggers is one of the best.  He has excellent friends.

"Cat Aralbai leads"

One of his books is “Eagle Dreams: Searching for Legends in Wild Mongolia,”  so he was able to match my photo of Bob embracing Eegie with a photo of a Mongolian hunter and his birds.  We always knew the big raptors were descended from dinosaurs.  The east slope of Montana, studded with fossil beds, yields the bones of creatures much like those revealed in Mongolian fossil beds.

Bookstore window display of "H is for Hawk"

Among those blogs Bodio lists is “Fretmarks,” the blog of Helen MacDonald whose new book “H is for Hawk” is barely released. 

MacDonald, who teaches in Cambridge colleges in England, is one of the best writers I know of, managing soaring metaphors with bog detail footings.  (Try her entry for 4-17-2011 which is a description of Brighton.) For a while after her father died she went dark and we worried.  This book is her working-through and resolution, but I haven’t got the book yet.  

"Pale Male"

In preparation I’ve just finished “The Goshawk” by T.H. White, precursor and underlying thread of “The Once and Future King” which I had better get around to reading.  The introduction is by Marie Winn, who wrote “Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male’s Story” about a near-albino red-tailed hawk living along Central Park under the eye of a monitoring camera.  

White, who identifies with Caliban because he is a half-mad recluse in a deteriorating cottage, and who later invented “Wart” to be a precursor of King Arthur, portrays his struggle to bond with “Gos,” an irascible, fire-eyed and stubborn bird.  White’s book becomes part of MacDonald’s book, for where there is great grief there is always great love and difficulty.

Someone once asked me, “Why do you always do hard things?”  I wouldn’t have to explain to all these falconer/writers.  Nothing is so seductive as the barely achievable.  The greater one’s skill, the more difficult the task needs to be and the more fulfilling the necessary growth and effort.  To take on a creature so opinionated and twisty as this goshawk, a bit damaged by “hunger breaks” in tail feathers (places where starvation prevented proper growth for an interval, making a weak spot susceptible to breaking, so that he had a ragged tail) especially since White had only three ancient books and no nearby expert help, meant that he was constantly reviewing plans, creating little scenarios and arrangements that might instill the trust and behavior he wanted.  More like soul-searching than conditioning.

Goshawk

In the early times the key to “manning” falcons was the idea of keeping the bird awake for days, always a little starved, so that the bird’s neurons finally made a map showing the falconer’s fist as its querencia where it could safely eat and sleep.  In his zeal to condition the bird and dread of creating more feather breaks, White fed too generously, which produced bad health and emerald washes.  (They are supposed to be white and Eegie’s sudden swashes did match the plaster we spilled in the shop.)

Here’s the first paragraph of “The Goshawk.”  “When I first saw him he was a round thing like a clothes basket covered with sacking.  But he was tumultuous and frightening, repulsive in the same way as snakes are frightening to people who do not know them, or dangerous as the sudden movement of a toad by the door step when one goes out at night with a lantern into the dew.  The sacking had been sewn with string, and he was bumping against it from underneath: bump, bump, bump, incessantly with more than a hint of lunacy.  The basket pulsed like a big heart in fever.  It gave out weird cries of protest, hysterical, terrified, but furious and authoritative.  It would have eaten anybody alive.”  The goshawk was Caliban’s Caliban.  

Except that Caliban did what Prospero required and it is unclear who White’s Prospero might have been.    But a metaphor can be pushed too far. (Today White would be called “gay,” but he was anything but gleeful and cheerful.)

White’s writing is full of strange antique and specialty words, many of them Anglo-Saxon four-letter designations not at all obscene but part of the hard daily life of a country people in close interaction with both plants and animals, both wild and domestic.  He calls himself in third person “the austringer” who is a flier of hawks, whose shape and habits are like an eagle's.  A goshawk (goose hawk) is three inches shorter than an eagle (both females are larger than males).  When it lands on the ground but misses its prey, it will give chase on foot.  And it does not hesitate to plunge into thickets.  It is thick winged, while a proper “falcon” has long scything wings, swifter and more nimble.

goshawk

falcon

The worst mishap of the bird was “bating,” leaping as to fly without realizing it was pinioned by leather jesses which left it dangling upside down.  Then the handler gently restores the bird to its grip on his hand.  Over and over and over.  When the handler himself loses control and “bates” he must recover his poise by himself.  It is the imposition of self-discipline that leaves the man starving and sleepless.  This is a benefit to the austringer.

We are fond of saying “survival of the fittest” as though denizens of some gymnasium training program would therefore rule the world.  In fact, the word means “fittingest,” those who fit their environment the most closely, the most pliantly, the most exquisitely -- like a free hawk in the air.  For a human to take on the role of a whole environment in order to fit the hawk to himself is both hubristic and full of peril, not least for the heart of the falconer.  Even the reader feels the rage and bruising, but also the ever promised soaring, even though in the end an escape may mean death by dangling from jesses caught in some high tree.  When the language is often that of Shakespeare, strange but vivid, the very difficulty is the reward.  The striving brings fitness.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/01/helen-macdonald-interview-hawk-grief